Interfaculty Initiative

Junior Symposium

The Mind/Brain/Behavior Symposium offers students a chance to investigate, both in both theoretical and concrete ways, how creative new research possibilities may emerge at the frontiers of the different fields concerned with mind, brain, and behavior. It is a midway fulcrum in your education, following up on your disciplinary training in your specific track and your exposure to a range of MBB issues through Science of Living Systems 20 and Molecular and Cellular Biology 80.

The symposium develops out of the perspective that animates MBB: we cannot adequately address the great intellectual questions and social challenges we confront with a single approach; rather, we must consider them from multiple perspectives. Scholarly disciplines emerge, evolve, converge, merge, and disappear as the problems that motivate them change. Each discipline is a kind of toolbox that provides a unique theoretical orientation, language, and methodology for generating and solving problems. One of the most exciting moments in the life of a discipline happens when boundaries become more porous or shift to make room for ideas and techniques from other fields, and we begin to see new ways to tackle old problems. Each symposium models this interdisciplinary enterprise through exploring a topic that currently engages a broad range of mind brain behavior researchers.